Chain of custody for evidence in legal contexts, refers to the chronological documentation or paper trail, showing the seizure, custody, control, transfer, analysis, and disposition of physical or electronic evidence. Chain of custody is critical in determining authenticity. Digital information, unlike documents, is tangible only on a storage device, such as nonvolatile memory. The nonvolatile memory, whether mechanical or non-mechanical, bears no resemblance to the text, numeric, image audio or video data that is stored on the nonvolatile memory further complicating the identification, handling, transport, storage and retrieval of the digital information. The more isolated the source of digital information, due to isolated locations or because of limited supervision and observation, the more difficult to establish authenticity for the chain of custody for digital data.
Currently, there is a requirement for high fidelity data, video and audio, for law enforcement activities, especially when that data is used in the justice framework to establish guilt or innocence. It becomes imperative that the video and audio data that is generated by the capturing apparatus incorporates as many security features as possible which also mandates that the chain of custody is as robust as possible. Therefore, the following steps are mandated in capture, transmission, and retention of video and audio data otherwise known as the chain of custody of the video and audio data:                1. The data capturing apparatus is powered on and in the correct configuration to collect the video and audio data.        2. The data capturing apparatus is uniquely identifiable.        3. The data capturing apparatus is uniquely associated with an individual operating the data capturing apparatus.        4. The data is date stamped and time stamped to establish chronology.        5. The data is encrypted to prevent the data from being altered, falsely generated, or deleted.        6. The data is stored as soon as possible, in a secure location where credentials are required to access the data.        
In addition to guaranteeing the chain of custody, real time sharing and distribution of the data provides additional security for lone workers, especially lone workers in hazardous work environments, such as law enforcement. If possible, all intermediate steps until the video and audio data are stored in a secure location should be minimized, supervised, and if possible, eliminated thereby reducing and/or removing any questions regarding the validity and authenticity of the video and audio data.
The current state of the art for police dash cams and the emerging body worn cameras rely on a method known as “store and forward” whereby the audio and video are stored on nonvolatile memory such as a hard disk in a trunk vault associated with the dash camera or a SD memory card, usually incorporated with the camera with little or no security. Then there is the manual transfer of the data to a central storage facility.
Because dash cams are integrated into the police vehicle electrical system, they are automatically activated when the police activate lights and siren in order to record video and audio of events instead of continuous video and audio recording which would generate an enormous volume of data to be stored and retrieved. The new body worn cameras are manually activated which has already caused chain of custody issues because the law enforcement office can choose what will be recorded. The removable memory cards are also and issue as they can be misplaced, lost, substituted, and erased. In addition there is no centralized supervision to know the health and status of the body worn cameras. Since the store and forward method only allows for observation by others after the incident has occurred, the current chain of custody provides the opportunity to tamper with or destroy evidence not favorable to the law enforcement officer.
Current form factors and attachment mechanisms also introduce failure modes that could break the chain of custody by allowing the video and audio capturing apparatus to be damaged or removed during physical interaction between the law enforcement officer and criminal suspects. Since the typical battery life of a camera taking movies is limited to a few hours, auxiliary batteries, tethered by exposed wires to the camera, provide additional failure modes by the wires becoming entangled with the surroundings or during physical interaction between an officer and civilians. Ruggedized and Military specification cell phones with their garment attaching pouches are ideal to reduce the failure modes of the video and audio capturing apparatus.
A ubiquitous wireless infrastructure of tremendous bandwidth would allow wireless transmission of video in real time. Although WiFi can accommodate the bandwidth of video data, it is not a ubiquitous infrastructure and has very limited range in the hundreds of feet. Cellular is ubiquitous, but the bandwidth required for video compressed to today's standards of H.264 or MPEG4 would require bandwidth that far exceeds today's 2G, 3G, and 4GLTE technology. This is why video, much less HD video, cannot be transmitted to or from a cellular device in real time.
Clearly, there is a need for an improved end to end system for live video and audio content delivery to a central facility that improves the current state of the art for chain of custody of data, real time observation of developing situations with law enforcement, especially lone workers, and real time exchange of video and audio data amongst law enforcement personnel.